


Growing Pains

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: We're not meant to be alone [6]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Body Horror, Drowning, Gen, Homesickness, Joe teaches Nile how to paint, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, as she drowns in tandem with Quynh and Booker, in which Nile adjusts to a life not her own, no one dies permanently, with a family wound tightly around one another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:08:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26219857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: The tap water tastes like salt and blood on Nile’s lips, in the mornings when she’s barely awake, when the world stands still, yet. Her knuckles ache; and her lungs feel heavy with lead, wedged into her ribcage. A language not her own is still strung on her vocal chords; and the flickering light of the street lamp outside is too bright; too harsh. Quynh is screaming.
Relationships: Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Nile Freeman & Quynh | Noriko
Series: We're not meant to be alone [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1906879
Comments: 30
Kudos: 164





	Growing Pains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aryelee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aryelee/gifts).



> “I once had a body that wasn’t a body—it was a voice in a god’s mouth. It was the holy vowel.”
> 
> — **Ruth Awad, “Moral Inventory,” published in**[ ** _Wildness_**](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Freadwildness.com%2F20%2Fawad-moral&t=NzEyMDhhNjc0YjA2NzEwYjI2NTVmOTVmMDQxMDQxNDc1MzhlZWIwOCwzQ0o5WEVxUQ%3D%3D&b=t%3ADn5B8HO2uNp94ZkmsLf31A&p=https%3A%2F%2Fquecksilvereyes.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188363292045%2Fsirenoirs-i-once-had-a-body-that-wasnt-a&m=0)

The tap water tastes like salt and blood on Nile’s lips, in the mornings when she’s barely awake, when the world stands still, yet. Her knuckles ache; and her lungs feel heavy with lead, wedged into her ribcage. A language not her own is still strung on her vocal chords; and the flickering light of the street lamp outside is too bright; too harsh. Quynh is screaming.

She closes the curtains with trembling hands and trembling lungs; salt crusted still. There’s something lingering deep in her bones, like a wound that never healed or the feeling of her femur breaking and healing with every rise and fall of her chest.

Andy lies curled up on the chair, her labrys in her hand, her knees tucked under her chin, and the cavity of Nile’s chest aches with a heart not her own. Quynh is dying. Sometimes, when she tilts her head just right, when Nicky brings baklava from the smallest market, tucked into the furthest corner of this city, and Andy throws her head back with a smile like a ghost, Nile can see what Quynh is screaming for.

Mostly, Andy looks tired. Mostly, Nile wishes she would put on the bulletproof vest.

She takes the blanket from the couch and puts it on her; a threadbare thing that feels older than she has ever dreamt of being. Andy barely moves, just grabs her labrys a bit tighter.

Nile’s body aches. Her muscles burn, her bones feel like shattered glass glued back together with careful hands. Her throat is a dry, heaving thing, and she’s trembling, still. The weights she bought on their first day here, when Andy still winced every time she moved, when Nicky and Joe could barely stand to be apart from one another, always in tandem, are too light, by now. She does a push-up and heals. She runs for miles and she heals. She disassembles all the guns, cleans them and puts them back together and she heals.

Andy shows her how to sharpen the longsword, the labrys, the scimitar, and Nile heals; aching. Nicky cooks dinner as Joe teaches her how to use kohl, and Nile heals and dies and heals again. Nile burns her hand and heals and she gets shot and she heals and she falls off a building and she heals and a desperate, dying man slits her throat; she dies in the arms of what loves her.

Before Andy took her from her life, her days were structured by the hour. Here, tucked in between the trauma of a hundred lifetimes, she barely knows what day it is at all. Training happens once a day when they feel like it. Language lessons happen in casual conversation about all that stretches between her and the others, meals are full and spicy and heavy with a tenderness that makes Nile ache as she did when Booker pulled her out of that car. Their lives happen in between sleep and prayer and Andy’s worn eyes.

At night, Quynh dies.

Nile’s prayers feel like shards of glass on her lips, her hands clasped in her lap, her crucifix heavy around her neck. Somewhere halfway across the world, her family mourns her by an empty grave, somewhere halfway across the world, Dizzy and Jay convince themselves that she had a scar, after all. Somewhere halfway across the world, Quynh is dying, still. Nile rests her head on her hands and thinks of her mother.

Her mother, with soft hands and a softer voice, with a backbone made of steel and a resolve made of iron, in a lifeboat in Chicago, clinging to her children for dear life. When Nile was just a girl – big mouthed and tumbling with laughter, her mother would braid her hair and kiss her forehead for each braid, tight against her scalp. The rain would pour outside, and the air would smell like pine trees and spring, and Nile would giggle with each kiss.

She saves every photograph she owns.

There’s a convenience store just down the road, and in the back of it, in between nail polishes and period pads, is a photo printer. Nile spends an entire afternoon and all her change with the grocery bag between her legs and her phone plugged into the printer until even the blurry picture of her brother in the most terrible Halloween costume he’s ever worn lies shiny and warm in the thick envelope.

She puts the photographs under her pillow and the groceries into the kitchen where Joe is cooking something that makes her eyes water, singing at the top of his lungs. There’s a vinyl playing behind him on a gramophone player that keeps skipping a few bars. Joe keeps singing anyway.

Nile grins at him and starts sorting the groceries into the spaces they’d carved out for them in this small kitchen, barely an oven and a cooking plate on the counter. Nicky calls something that might be Italian or Genoese or Latin from the adjacent room, and Nile leans against the doorframe to watch Joe cook.

Once, when she was barely tall enough to reach the handles of the kitchen cupboards without a stool, her mother had sat her down on the kitchen table and kept on cooking. As Nile sat there, kicking her legs, her mother had sang, not a care for pitch or lyrics.

There’s nothing in the world like her mother.

Sometimes, when she wakes from Quynh’s deaths, when her photographs don’t seem real anymore and her brother’s birthday comes and passes without her, when Nicky’s hands are something helpless curled about her spine, Nile wishes she could go home. Joe’s hugs are warm and solid and full of love, Nicky’s words are soft and careful, threaded around her, but none of them are Booker’s rough voice, drowning in alcohol and salt water, asking her about her mother. Nicky’s father is a smear in his memory, his sister a song and a prayer on Easter. Joe’s family is the feeling of fondness and love in his chest, the food sizzling in the kitchen. Andy’s family are barely a concept she can grasp.

And, _God_ , Nile just wants to go home and lie in her mother’s arms.

Instead, she calls Booker.

_What was it like to bury your child?_

Joe insists on teaching her how to sketch, makes Nicky stand by the sunlight for minutes at a time, and Nile never manages to get all of him on paper, a blur of movement. Sometimes he points out a stranger in a café, a passenger on a train. Sometimes Nile just sketches Andy’s smile or the swing of her labrys. Sometimes, she sits in the main room next to Joe as he watches TV, tries to find the lines of his laughter, the curl of his shoulders towards a love that isn’t there. Her hands are smudged with graphite and her sketchbook is filled with barely finished sketches by the time Joe lets her try to use a canvas.

There’s something about oil paint and the way it layers that reminds Nile of the sea in a way she has never experienced it. There’s something about the texture of it that feels like rotting iron and groaning shackles. In the end, the canvas drips with Quynh.

In the end, she doesn’t show any of them. Instead, she takes a picture of it and sends it to Booker with a string of emojis. He doesn’t reply. Nile tucks the canvas into a corner of her room and starts anew.

The tap water tastes like salt and blood, in the mornings, and Nile cries through her prayers and the homesickness locked firmly into the cavity of her chest. She trains until she feels like her body might never stop aching again, cradled in the arms of a hundred lifetimes of love. She sharpens the weapons and cleans the guns and learns languages that have long since died and languages that haven’t.

On missions, she goes first.


End file.
